When she is making sumi on her inkstone, Shinoda says, she recalls the limpid waters of a river in the mountainous Hida area where she spent one of her summers before the war. She describes how strong is the pull of the scene of cormorant fishing on the Nagara river, when “movement and stillness, light and shadow intermingle, interlaced by time and color, white and black” as torchlight glimmers in the night on the waters at the foot of the mountains. The flicker and flow of flame and current through an immovable landscape—such images are among those that pulse within Shinoda’s art. Images and memories of the ceaselessly flowing waters of the Nagara river link Shinoda to her heart’s home in Gifu.
A single, serene line, a dot of sumi ink, her devotion to ink painting, as ceaseless as the flow of the Nagara river, takes beautiful and profound form in the lines and shapes of her works.